València 9 snapshot [3]

Today was somehow a low-key day for me in terms of talks as I was preparing a climb in the Benidorm backcountry (thanks to the advice of Alicia Quiròs) and trying to copy routes from the (low oh so low!) debit wireless at the hotel. The session I attended in the morning was on Bayesian non-parametrics, with David Dunson giving a talk on non-parametric classification, a talk whose contents were so dense in information that it felt like three talks rather than one, especially when there was no paper to back it up! Katja Ickstadt modelled graphical dependence structures using non-parametrics but also mixtures of normals across different graph structures, an innovation I found interesting if difficult to interpret. Tom Loredo concluded the session with a broad and exciting picture of the statistical challenges found in spectral astronomy (even though I often struggle to make sense of the frequency data astronomers favour).

The evening talk by Ioanna Manolopoulou was a superbly rendered study on cell dynamics with incredible 3D animations of those cell systems, representing the Langevin diffusion on the force fields in those systems as evolving vector fields. And then I gave my poster on the Savage-Dickey paradox, hence missing all the other posters in this session… The main difficulty in presenting the result was not about the measure-theoretic difficulty, but rather in explaining the Savage-Dickey representation since this was unknown to most passerbys.